The great accomplishment of Jobs's life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies - his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness - in the service of perfection.

Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, 'I don't buy it.' Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

I'm in the storytelling business, and so you're always drawn to the unusual. And early on, I discovered that's the easiest way to tell stories... If you come up through a newspaper as I did, your whole goal is to get a story on the front page, and you only get something on the front page if it's unusual.

The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.

Character isn't what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn't a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.

I've always been baffled by how much we over-rate the statistically insignificant differences that separate competitors at the top end of the distribution.